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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KLP who wrote (55370)	10/29/2002 3:00:56 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 281500

The WSJ.com's version of Bush and the UN. REVIEW & OUTLOOK Our Friends at the U.N. And Saddam's amigos south of the border. Tuesday, October 29, 2002 12:01 a.m. President Bush is understandably losing patience with the U.N. on Iraq, noting yesterday that Saddam Hussein "is a person who has made the United Nations look foolish." We all know about the French and Russians, but lately Mexican President Vicente Fox has also joined the soft-on-Saddam queue. This council of conciliation is working to water down any use-of-force resolution to the point that it would prop up Saddam more than disarm him. Among other phrases, the countries object to declaring that Saddam is in "material breach" of earlier U.N. resolutions. Iraq has spent the past decade expelling U.N. arms inspectors, as well as trying to rearm with the most dangerous weapons possible, and this isn't a "breach" of disarmament promises? What is it, a foot fault? If Iraq isn't violating U.N. resolutions, then the world can forget about every future U.N. resolution too. They clearly mean nothing at all. The Franco-Russian-Mexican position isn't diplomacy so much as a denial of reality. Instead of attempting to enforce the 1990 and 1991 U.N. resolutions, they are walking away from them. A word is in order here about our friends the Mexicans. Mr. Fox came to power as the voice of a new, more mature Mexico, a country confident enough not to engage in reflexive anti-Americanism. But his Iraq position looks more like a reversion to Mexico's previous 70 years of solidarity with the global left. On the Security Council, Mr. Fox is turning out to be less helpful to the U.S. than China's Jiang Zemin. No doubt Mr. Fox is frustrated that after 9/11 Mexico has moved from a top U.S. priority to one well down the list. We too wish Mr. Bush would resume his quest for a Mexican migration deal, a Fox priority. But we have to say that Mr. Fox is wrong if he thinks that joining France in sticking a thumb in America's eye will make that outcome any more likely. Mr. Bush was already going to have to overcome opposition within his own party for a migration pact. The Mexican stiff-arm on Iraq will only convince more Republicans that our neighbors to the south are more useful as political piñatas than as partners. And Mr. Bush will be even less inclined to risk his own prestige to help out Mr. Fox. It's one thing for a Mexican president to cede his foreign policy to the left for some blather about global poverty. But helping the French block the U.S. in the Security Council, and on a matter of vital national interest, is something Americans won't soon forget. As a publication that has worked long and hard to promote American understanding of and sympathy for Mexico, we fear that the progress we've made in this cause may be wiped out at a stroke. The same goes, by the way, for the entire U.N. The end of the Cold War gave that body a chance to become a moral and strategic force in the world, and during the Gulf War it briefly looked like it might fulfill that promise. But the U.N. has since reverted to a lowest-common-denominator "multilateralism" that can't even enforce its own resolutions. The U.N. was feckless in the Balkans, with peace imposed only through NATO military power. Its most notable achievement in recent years was bouncing the U.S. off its Commission on Human Rights in favor of Libya, Syria and Zimbabwe. President Bush repeated yesterday that the U.S. and its real friends will proceed in Iraq with or without the U.N.'s blessing. That little league of nations is going to have to decide whose side it's on.